Netflix says Google Fiber is “most consistently fast ISP in America”

But company finds KC users are seeing speeds of 2.55Mbps—far lower than 1Gbps.

Sure, you can run Speedtest.net or max out your BitTorrent download, but as we found out last month, it’s hard to get a good gauge of how fast and consistent an ISP is using real-world, high-bandwidth applications.

However, the streaming service’s own numbers put Google Fiber's speed at 2.55Mbps for Netflix streams—far lower, as I observed recently—than one might expect for a gigabit connection.

Verizon FiOS, Comcast, and Charter came in at positions two through four, respectively, clustering between 2.19 and 2.17 Mbps. Cablevision rounded out the top five at 2.15Mbps.

“The average performance is well below the peak performance due to a variety of factors including home Wi-Fi, a variety of devices, and a variety of encodes,” wrote Ken Florance, vice president of content delivery at Netflix, on a company blog. “The relative ranking, however, should be an accurate indicator of relative bandwidth typically experienced across all users, homes, and applications.”

It's a shame these ratings never include EPB, the Chattanooga fiber offering. I'd be interested to see what it looks like, measured from the outside.

From the inside, it's pretty much awesome, but it's hard to really measure the quality of a connection unless you have access to a better, faster connection... which would mean that I'd need real hardware on a gigabit connection to test my 250Mbit line. Ideally, I'd want several, all over the country.

Obviously, I don't have that, but Netflix does. Wish they'd publish more of their stats.

Just because the user has 1Gb/s doesn't mean that its all going to be used streaming. I wonder what the theoretical top speed netflix can stream to? I also wonder if Neflix has provided proxy servers to Google to sit in their fiber CO/HE.

Just because there is little congestion the last mile, doesn't mean there is not congestion at the uplinks or POPs.

Just because the user has 1Gb/s doesn't mean that its all going to be used streaming. I wonder what the theoretical top speed netflix can stream to? I also wonder if Neflix has provided proxy servers to Google to sit in their fiber CO/HE.

Just because there is little congestion the last mile, doesn't mean there is not congestion at the uplinks or POPs.

Something tells me that Netflix providing proxy servers to Google would of went against their licensing agreements.

I'd like to know what the relative bitrates are for the level of quality of an HD stream. Would anything over, say 1.8Mbps result in no further increase in quality?

Blu-Rays are 36Mbps, so I would suggest that there's always room for improvement over 1.8Mbps. Even the best quality streams from Netflix (and with their latest encoding they're getting bloody good) are not matching the quality you can get from a Blu-ray.

It looks like others have already touched on the point but how exactly is Netflix measuring this? By the users who are streaming their content? Wouldn't their testing then be limited by the highest bitrate streams? I can't imagine Netflix offers streams that are much higher than 2.5 Mbps.

I'd like to know what the relative bitrates are for the level of quality of an HD stream. Would anything over, say 1.8Mbps result in no further increase in quality?

Blu-Rays are 36Mbps, so I would suggest that there's always room for improvement over 1.8Mbps. Even the best quality streams from Netflix (and with their latest encoding they're getting bloody good) are not matching the quality you can get from a Blu-ray.

I don't remember exact numbers, but I want to say xbox video's 1080 stuff was in the 10-15mbit range? Blu-ray would need ~30mbit to stream but as stated encoding has value. And I don't even want to speculate where 4k would be. Needless to say, there is definitely room to utilize the bandwidth "eventually".

I'm not sure gigabit home internet is even useful. For even my cheap 6 Mbps connection, the bottleneck for most applications is server side, not my downlink speed.

I have a 120/10 cable link and pretty much any service I use for big downloads hits the max with me, some do throttle their bandwidth, ofcourse, but I rarely see the speeds you mention but as always YMMV.

I'm not sure gigabit home internet is even useful. For even my cheap 6 Mbps connection, the bottleneck for most applications is server side, not my downlink speed.

Until you decide to download a file that is over 1GB. Such as a demo, or a game from Steam, then you will experience the 6Mbps bottleneck that your connection is. Downloading Infamous 2 on PS3 was a 15GB download, it took nearly 3 hours on my 30Mbps connection.

Basing the fiber speed off the local user's devices seems like a really bad way to create generalizations around broadband speed.

In fact, unless they run some sort of period speed test, I can't see their numbers being useful at all for this sort of thing.

Sounds like they are just looking at the average bitrate their servers are sending which isn't really good for anything but their own internal use.

PS GOOGLE PLZ TO BE HAVING FIBER IN BOISE PLZ

Related to that, I have Comcast and some pretty good down speeds, but my Netflix speeds (and curiously ONLY Netflix -- across all devices) were simply pathetic. I replaced my router (D-Link DIR-815, a year old) with an Airport Extreme and the problem hasn't occurred since.

I'd like to know what the relative bitrates are for the level of quality of an HD stream. Would anything over, say 1.8Mbps result in no further increase in quality?

Blu-Rays are 36Mbps, so I would suggest that there's always room for improvement over 1.8Mbps. Even the best quality streams from Netflix (and with their latest encoding they're getting bloody good) are not matching the quality you can get from a Blu-ray.

Are Blu-rays encoded at all? If not, does it make much sense that using 36Mbps of data to update a scene in a movie that may or may not change more than once a minute?

All digital video is encoded. DVDs used MPEG-2. Blu-rays use MPEG-4 -- in fact, I think I even read somewhere that they are actually encoded with H.264 which is what the vast majority of videos on the web are also encoded in, including all video content in iTunes as well as Netflix, I'd guess. There are a lot of highly technical encoding flags and options available but, in general, the higher the bitrate the video is encoded at the better it's going to look.

I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused. While Blu-rays and Netflix streams are both encoded with H.264 MPEG-4, Blu-rays are, I believe, relatively uncompressed video (it depends on the length of the movie you're trying to fit onto the 25 GB disc) whereas the Netflix streams will be highly compressed in order to achieve those low bitrates that enable smooth streaming.

All digital video is encoded. DVDs used MPEG-2. Blu-rays use MPEG-4 -- in fact, I think I even read somewhere that they are actually encoded with H.264 which is what the vast majority of videos on the web are also encoded in, including all video content in iTunes as well as Netflix, I'd guess. There are a lot of highly technical encoding flags and options available but, in general, the higher the bitrate the video is encoded at the better it's going to look. I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused.

Yes, Blu-Ray does use H.264 and Netflix probably does too. But if you've played around much with video encoding, you know that you can drop the bit rate quite a bit with barely a perceptible change in quality. (I suspect that the reason is that as you reduce the bit rate, you throw out the least perceptible data first.) I doubt 2Mbps looks as good at 36Mpbs, but it's probably not too much worse.

All digital video is encoded. DVDs used MPEG-2. Blu-rays use MPEG-4 -- in fact, I think I even read somewhere that they are actually encoded with H.264 which is what the vast majority of videos on the web are also encoded in, including all video content in iTunes as well as Netflix, I'd guess. There are a lot of highly technical encoding flags and options available but, in general, the higher the bitrate the video is encoded at the better it's going to look. I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused.

Yes, Blu-Ray does use H.264 and Netflix probably does too. But if you've played around much with video encoding, you know that you can drop the bit rate quite a bit with barely a perceptible change in quality. (I suspect that the reason is that as you reduce the bit rate, you throw out the least perceptible data first.) I doubt 2Mbps looks as good at 36Mpbs, but it's probably not too much worse.

I'm pretty familiar with video encoding as it's one of the primary things I do for my job. Video encoding is almost more of an art than an exact science involving all sorts of things like the resolution, the bitrate, the frame rate, b-frames, etc. etc. I do agree with your point though in that you can make a 2 Mbps file look almost as good as a 36 Mbps file if it's done right.

I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused. While Blu-rays and Netflix streams are both encoded with H.264 MPEG-4, Blu-rays are, I believe, relatively uncompressed video (it depends on the length of the movie you're trying to fit onto the 25 GB disc) whereas the Netflix streams will be highly compressed in order to achieve those low bitrates that enable smooth streaming.

I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused. While Blu-rays and Netflix streams are both encoded with H.264 MPEG-4, Blu-rays are, I believe, relatively uncompressed video (it depends on the length of the movie you're trying to fit onto the 25 GB disc) whereas the Netflix streams will be highly compressed in order to achieve those low bitrates that enable smooth streaming.

Incidentally, BDs are 25GB *per layer*, not necessarily per disc.

Yes, you are correct. Has double layer actually taken off though? I was under the impression it wasn't used that much outside of data backup for PC's. I thought the vast majority of movie BDs are single layer.

I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused. While Blu-rays and Netflix streams are both encoded with H.264 MPEG-4, Blu-rays are, I believe, relatively uncompressed video (it depends on the length of the movie you're trying to fit onto the 25 GB disc) whereas the Netflix streams will be highly compressed in order to achieve those low bitrates that enable smooth streaming.

Incidentally, BDs are 25GB *per layer*, not necessarily per disc.

Yes, you are correct. Has double layer actually taken off though? I was under the impression it wasn't used that much outside of data backup for PC's. I thought the vast majority of movie BDs are single layer.

I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused. While Blu-rays and Netflix streams are both encoded with H.264 MPEG-4, Blu-rays are, I believe, relatively uncompressed video (it depends on the length of the movie you're trying to fit onto the 25 GB disc) whereas the Netflix streams will be highly compressed in order to achieve those low bitrates that enable smooth streaming.

Incidentally, BDs are 25GB *per layer*, not necessarily per disc.

Yes, you are correct. Has double layer actually taken off though? I was under the impression it wasn't used that much outside of data backup for PC's. I thought the vast majority of movie BDs are single layer.

Didnt Ars witness the speed of Google fiber itself ?One would think that someone on Ars would let the writers know that Netfix won't use of 1 Gbps. Maybe speculation could be why it isn't the highest bandwidth Netflix could support ( I think I saw 5bps) but others have already pointed out that this could be on Netflix's end.

I suspect that huge last-mile speed is mostly useful when you can parallelize usage. At any specific time, I could be using my home network for:

- Downloading some massive dev tool- Working remotely via OpenVPN- Kid 1 watching Netflix- Kid 2 playing online with Xbox Live- Wife watching youtube in the laptop, of course in HD- Have lots of browser windows open, some of them running Flash video ads- All family smartphones and laptops deciding to sync at the same time- My Windows laptop downloading updates (suppose it's Tuesday)- And maybe I'm such a nice neighbor, and I keep a guest account open in my router- My visiting brother-in-law torrenting three games and watching HD porn

Ok, last item was a bit of a stretch but the point is, with a beefy connection I can do all this stuff without slowing down any of them.

The margin between Google 1 GB and Verizon FIOS is relatively small. I guess both deliver good enough service for Netflix streaming.

That said, I'd wish they publish numbers for 90 percentile or standard deviation. Because average is not a good indicator for speed when it matters. It mashes together the excellent 3 AM with the not so great 7:30 PM. However, the user experience is spoiled if the peak times are always slow!

Just because the user has 1Gb/s doesn't mean that its all going to be used streaming. I wonder what the theoretical top speed netflix can stream to? I also wonder if Neflix has provided proxy servers to Google to sit in their fiber CO/HE.

Just because there is little congestion the last mile, doesn't mean there is not congestion at the uplinks or POPs.

Something tells me that Netflix providing proxy servers to Google would of went against their licensing agreements.

Why is everyone so upset, the point is to hold ISP's accountable for their throttling or bandwidth issues. The relative order is the important part unless you think there will be a systematic difference in router setups (ie geeks tend to have gigabit routers). Google will stay on top not because its the raw fastest, but because it will consistently be the fastest - even at peak hours where most ISP's will struggle.

Everyone chill out and just be happy that someone is providing you with unbiased measurements of ISP quality.

Kind of an irrelevant notion coming from Netflix. They don't buffer much of the video (I think the most I've ever seen is about a 5 minute buffer). After the initial spurt to get the buffer filled the video will only download at the bitrate of the video itself.

The good part of this is it sounds like Google Fiber users have no need to worry that they'll ever get anything less than the highest quality that Netflix is currently able to offer. There's also significant amount of headroom for them if Netflix wanted to increase the bitrate in order to increase the quality. BD-quality streaming videos with HDMA or DTS-HD? Yes, please.

bruceiv wrote:

I'm not sure gigabit home internet is even useful. For even my cheap 6 Mbps connection, the bottleneck for most applications is server side, not my downlink speed.

Even if you don't saturate your link from any one source, you still have a significant amount of bandwidth left over for other things. Downloading several video podcasts, cloud syncing your files, watching a movie while family members check their emails, stream music, update their Facebook pages and watch their own programming. All going on simultaneously and at the highest quality. Awesome.

Besides, Google isn't pretending that Gigabit is absolutely essential now. What they're trying to do is push the telecos into a position to have to provide reasonably priced highest-possible speed networks so that we can see what's possible in the future. If a significant fraction of the country never got off of dial-up we'd never have seen Youtube, never mind Netflix streaming. What's possible in the future that hasn't been dreamed up yet because the infrastructure doesn't exist for it to work? Right now we don't know, and that's the other part of the question Google's trying to put infrastructure in place to answer.

I think the coolest thing about this is that it provides a real world metric that people like my mom & stepdad can understand. To them, speedtests show X is a meaningless number... but "X ISP handles consistently better streams from netflix better than Y ISP". ISP's always knew the speedtest numbers are meaningless, & they know this number is meaningful.

Now with netflix posting this monthly, if ISP Q decides to screw with netflix traffic while asking for a payout to undo the throttle, it makes new when ISP Q drops 10 places (or whatever). If the ISP does it to just the better quality stream rates to keep them at good enough quality for people not to notice, the ranking still drops & the competition can join up with the media to pounce for netflix

I wish that rankings like these would include some amount of regional breakdown. To give just one example, a few months ago Comcast bumped up their speeds but only in markets that also have FiOS (and IIIRC in response to Verizon doubling the bandwidth on some of the FiOS tiers for free), as a way of keeping people from defecting. So a Comcast connection in a FiOS market != a FiOS connection somewhere out in the boonies.

All digital video is encoded. DVDs used MPEG-2. Blu-rays use MPEG-4 -- in fact, I think I even read somewhere that they are actually encoded with H.264 which is what the vast majority of videos on the web are also encoded in, including all video content in iTunes as well as Netflix, I'd guess. There are a lot of highly technical encoding flags and options available but, in general, the higher the bitrate the video is encoded at the better it's going to look. I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused.

Yes, Blu-Ray does use H.264 and Netflix probably does too. But if you've played around much with video encoding, you know that you can drop the bit rate quite a bit with barely a perceptible change in quality. (I suspect that the reason is that as you reduce the bit rate, you throw out the least perceptible data first.) I doubt 2Mbps looks as good at 36Mpbs, but it's probably not too much worse.

I'm pretty familiar with video encoding as it's one of the primary things I do for my job. Video encoding is almost more of an art than an exact science involving all sorts of things like the resolution, the bitrate, the frame rate, b-frames, etc. etc. I do agree with your point though in that you can make a 2 Mbps file look almost as good as a 36 Mbps file if it's done right.

I would never expect Netflix to put in the effort. This goes for any other streaming service. I really would be surprised if they are doing anything more than some automated process. I doubt that Netflix is putting any more effort into this process than any of us that rip stuff and re-encode it. Probably LESS.

So all other things being equal, the bigger file will probably be much higher quality.

A studio MIGHT put more effort into an encode. I wouldn't expect Netflix to though.

I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused. While Blu-rays and Netflix streams are both encoded with H.264 MPEG-4, Blu-rays are, I believe, relatively uncompressed video (it depends on the length of the movie you're trying to fit onto the 25 GB disc) whereas the Netflix streams will be highly compressed in order to achieve those low bitrates that enable smooth streaming.

Incidentally, BDs are 25GB *per layer*, not necessarily per disc.

Yes, you are correct. Has double layer actually taken off though? I was under the impression it wasn't used that much outside of data backup for PC's. I thought the vast majority of movie BDs are single layer.

There are plenty of BluRays out there where the main title is 35G or more.

All digital video is encoded. DVDs used MPEG-2. Blu-rays use MPEG-4 -- in fact, I think I even read somewhere that they are actually encoded with H.264 which is what the vast majority of videos on the web are also encoded in, including all video content in iTunes as well as Netflix, I'd guess. There are a lot of highly technical encoding flags and options available but, in general, the higher the bitrate the video is encoded at the better it's going to look. I think perhaps you're getting "encoding" and "compression" confused.

Yes, Blu-Ray does use H.264 and Netflix probably does too. But if you've played around much with video encoding, you know that you can drop the bit rate quite a bit with barely a perceptible change in quality. (I suspect that the reason is that as you reduce the bit rate, you throw out the least perceptible data first.) I doubt 2Mbps looks as good at 36Mpbs, but it's probably not too much worse.

I'm pretty familiar with video encoding as it's one of the primary things I do for my job. Video encoding is almost more of an art than an exact science involving all sorts of things like the resolution, the bitrate, the frame rate, b-frames, etc. etc. I do agree with your point though in that you can make a 2 Mbps file look almost as good as a 36 Mbps file if it's done right.

I would never expect Netflix to put in the effort. This goes for any other streaming service. I really would be surprised if they are doing anything more than some automated process. I doubt that Netflix is putting any more effort into this process than any of us that rip stuff and re-encode it. Probably LESS.

So all other things being equal, the bigger file will probably be much higher quality.

A studio MIGHT put more effort into an encode. I wouldn't expect Netflix to though.

I think there might be some difference in semantics here. Netflix definitely encodes, in fact they do at a bunch of varying levels. It's the reason you can watch a show on your phone at 3G. I want to say they've got at least 7 different bitrate streams they dynamically switch between depending on your connection. Of course, you are correct that the process is most likely nearly entirely automated.

While if you specifically optimize a 30mbit blu-ray to a 2mbit stream you can probably retain much of the quality, doing so with an automated algorithm is probably not efficient enough to not be very noticeable. So I'd be willing to say for the automated encoding, you should be at 7-10mbit to get a nice picture. This is of course entirely subjective based on my perception. The difference between a 10mbit stream and 30mbit blu-ray is noticeably irritable to some, while others think a DVD is pretty much the same quality as a blu-ray.

Actually Bluray and DVD are all VBR and can have extremely high bursts rates if they need to. Internet streaming these days is a combination of multiple CBR rates combined with a transport protocol. The transport protocol will test both the line speed of the connection and the decode capabilities of the viewer and will throttle accordingly. So those numbers are pretty reliable as average line speeds and the large sample size should eliminate any of the limits of decoding hardware.

Well the CDN is free, and takes load off of an ISP's backbone. Its kinda a win/win as long as the ISP doesn't see themselves in competition with Netflix.

Knowing what I do about the Google fiber project, I believe the are trying to break even or even lose money on the IPTV delivery, and then there is YouTube, but I think Google really is agnostic to the content that is delivered over the network, and wants to shame cable over speeds and net-neutrality, so with that in mind, I would imagine they might even want the Netflix CDN if they dont have it already.

AdamM wrote:

headhot wrote:

Just because the user has 1Gb/s doesn't mean that its all going to be used streaming. I wonder what the theoretical top speed netflix can stream to? I also wonder if Neflix has provided proxy servers to Google to sit in their fiber CO/HE.

Just because there is little congestion the last mile, doesn't mean there is not congestion at the uplinks or POPs.

Something tells me that Netflix providing proxy servers to Google would of went against their licensing agreements.